


Fallout

by Lillian



Category: Dexter (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Incest, POV Outsider, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-27 10:39:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10807428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lillian/pseuds/Lillian
Summary: All the family skeletons are out of the closet.





	1. Astor

Astor thought she'd heard it all. _Your mom fucked a serial killer, she must have known, or was she that stupid, didn't your dad die in prison, talk about having a type, did you know too, was it a family activity_. Her grandparents talked about moving away once the reporters showed up and everyone found out they were Dexter's former family, but Astor didn't want to. They didn't understand that it would be the same everywhere, even if they changed their names, that once their pictures turned up on the Internet - _Satan's spawn, little whore_ , gleefully captioned - it was over. So Astor at least refused to be run out of town.

But that was before Dexter and Deb got caught. Astor read about it afterwards, the keyboard making a sound like chattering teeth under her shaking fingers. A crazy old cat lady saw them check into a Super 8 in some bumfuck town in Arizona a stone's throw away from the Mexican border. She must have had a devil of a time convincing the cops that she'd actually seen the Morgans, America's most famous serial killer family. But she had and eventually the cops must have gotten their shit together and kicked down the door of the motel room without any stupid warnings like "open up, it's the police".

That was how they got to see the show. Astor didn't want to focus on that part, wished that she could somehow know without reading, so she skimmed, words and phrases jumping at her here and there, searing themselves into her mind. "Engaged in intercourse" was one. _They were fucking when the cops found them, my brother told me_. "Rape kit" was another. _Did he use to fuck you too Astor, did your mom mind?_ "Psychological evaluation" slithered past like a smug fat snake. _I heard her brother was asleep on the next bed, and once he woke up he wouldn't stop screaming for his **parents**_. And over it all like a stamp, like a brand, "incest". _Incestincestincest_.

Astor swung around in the chair, the room lurching precariously, and folded in two with her chin resting on her hands, her hands resting on her knees, her feet planted on the ground but never grounded, her hair swinging down mercifully to cover it all until the black spots stopped dancing in her vision. She didn't know what would be worse, that Dexter had raped Deb or that he hadn't. They'd seemed so normal, they'd seemed like her and Cody, if a little closer. How was this possible, how was any of this possible?

She thought about Harrison, Harrison coming to live with them when it was all over, and fear rose up within her like a tide of oily, polluted water. She'd loved her youngest brother, up until a day or two ago she thought she still did, but the idea of this corruption anywhere near her or Cody made her freeze with horror and revulsion. What if she and Cody contracted the same illness Harrison was exposed to for so long? She couldn't imagine watching him, feeling his eyes on her, always wondering, letting him touch her and not knowing what he was _thinking_. He was her brother and he'd been kidnapped by a monster and she should want to save him but in her heart of hearts she didn't. She wanted to save herself.

There was guilt there too but it was nowhere as strong as the fear, and Astor realized how weak she was, that she wasn't nearly as strong as her mother who'd kept and brought up and loved the children of the guy who raped her so often it probably counted as a routine date-night thing.

There was a flash of thought, so simple and seductive. She would take down the jar on top of her wardrobe, unscrew the cap, fish out the money inside, birthday and Christmas money from the last couple of years, _some of it from Dexter_. She would bike to the house of the greasy-haired guy everyone knew sold pot, and maybe even stronger stuff. She'd buy a bag of white powder from him, didn't matter what, meth or heroin or even fucking laundry detergent, it was all the same. Once you shot up, either way you didn't have to think any more, she knew that much.

And why not? Like father, like daughter. Maybe it was impossible to fight your demon, maybe it always got you in the end because it was inside you, it was part of your blood or rooted into the deepest corner of your mind, waiting for you to slip up so it could sink its teeth in when you were down. Maybe it was easier to just stop fighting.

Maybe that was what Dexter had thought, maybe that was what had flitted through Deb's mind. Astor would never know.

She dug her fingernails into her thighs with punishing strength and thought, "not today".


	2. Masuka

Someone upstairs paid a lot of money for a fancy shrink to come over and try to teach them to recognize sociopaths. The whole miserable department, lined up on chairs so hard they might as well have popped Viagra, sweating like pigs. The whole exercise about as useful as a hedgehog in a condom factory, as Vince's grandma used to say.

Sociopaths tended to be exceptionally charming. Dexter wasn't charming, he was a dweeb like the rest of Forensics. In fact he was much less charming than Vince himself.

Sociopaths never did anything for other people unless there was a direct and immediate gain for themselves. Half of Vince's co-workers were backstabbing, lazy asses out for his job. Dexter had been Helpful Hetty compared to some of them.

Sociopaths had poor impulse control. Yeah, Designated Driver Dexter with his freakishly clean apartment and carefully scheduled life sure sounded like he fit that.

By the end of it Vince was starting to wonder whether he seemed like he covered the clinical criteria better than Dexter ever had.

And boy, there were a lot of new faces around willing to be the judge of that. Sometimes Vince felt like he, Angel and Quinn were the only ones left from the old team, and Quinn didn't count for much these days. Behind every corner there was a shiny new addition to the department, quick to adopt an expression of pious constipation at every off-color joke as if it was the black humor that had made Dexter want to work here. Like it was news normal people didn't stick around in Homicide anyway.

There wasn't even a new blood guy. Dexter's replacement insisted he was a "situational crime scene recovery expert" instead. Like the position itself was haunted. The whole department was haunted, if you asked Vince, by Doakes and LaGuerta and even Dexter and Debra, for all that the Morgans were alive and on the run. Vince wondered what the shrink would have to say about the fact that he had started calling them "the Morgans" in his mind like the media did. They even seemed distant, not like people he'd known and been friendly with for years.

In another sick turn of events he was bowling when the news broke. He botched his throw and wordlessly hurried after Angel who muscled them a path to the suddenly crowded TV in the corner of the bowling alley. The mood was hushed, as if in a church. On the screen a smug suit informed the good, law-abiding citizens of the US that _the Morgans_ had been apprehended in a motel near Lukeville, Arizona, less than three miles from the Mexico border. Fucking unbelievable.

No members of the public were hurt, the suit said, like it was to his personal credit, and Harrison was just fine. Then a reporter shouted another question Vince didn't hear and the fed got the look of a guy who wanted to fidget or loosen his collar or show some other unprofessional sign of humanity. He said only that the circumstances of the arrest made them reconsider to what extent Debra Morgan had been her brother's willing accomplice.

They showed footage of Dexter after that, almost like a distraction. He was being walked to a PTV. Deb was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Harrison. Dexter looked completely relaxed, like someone had just oiled his joints. His face didn't show any emotion, and it looked utterly natural on him. He strolled forward like there weren't handcuffs on his wrists or hands on his arms directing every movement. As Vince watched, Dexter drew his lower lip into his mouth absent-mindedly. There was a cut there, barely-visible but fresh. In the next moment Dexter's head disappeared behind the open rear door of the van and Vince suddenly realized that all the hairs on his arms were standing at attention, that his throat was burning and that his balls were trying to crawl back into his body in a surge of primal fear so deep and instinctual his brain could hardly process it.

Angel opened his mouth to say something, and Vince blurted out "I gotta go home and water my fish. I mean, feed my plants."

He hightailed it out of there like it was him who was the criminal. His throat still felt hot, constricted and hurt every time he swallowed, so he spent the rest of the evening researching rabies, half-convinced he'd contracted it from the poodle he let lick his hand last week because its owner was a babe. Slowly, research calmed him down. No matter how the foundations of the world shook, hypochondria was one thing you could always count on. He fell asleep on the couch and woke up thirsty as a bishop on Easter Sunday. No rabies. Of course not. That would have been preposterous.

By the time he'd had a shower and washed off the last remnants of fear sweat down the drain he'd almost convinced himself all was fine again. Still, his laptop remained on the desk, judgementally closed. An arm's reach away was a buzzing hive of strangers discussing the news, the conclusions they'd drawn and the details they'd seen from the safe distance of impartiality unreachable to Vince. _The lick of a lip, a somehow revealing lack of tension_. What it all meant, if it meant anything.

For once, Vince didn't want to know the whole sordid truth.


	3. Quinn

Two months after Deb disappeared, Joey started going to a therapist. It was either that or ranting at strangers in bars and he'd already done that when Deb dumped him. Now that she'd taken off with her serial killer brother Joey figured more drastic measures were called for.

The therapist's name was Michelle Ross and she looked like somebody's third grade math teacher. He told her that to break the ice and she asked him if daily interactions often made him feel like he was being graded. That's when it dawned on him she was a terrible therapist. It was why he kept coming. It was comforting to know he wasn't the only fuck-up in the room.

He told her about Deb and their train wreck of a relationship, starting with the time they hooked up in a bathroom.

"Her brother Dexter's bathroom?" asked Dr. Ross.

"That's what I said," said Joey. He didn't like being interrupted now he was on a roll. "What does it matter?"

Dr. Ross wrote busily on her pad.

Joey went through the whole thing. The aforementioned hook up in Dexter's bathroom. Growing closer when Deb borrowed his couch to escape the menagerie of Dexter's family crashing at her place. Deb ditching him for the first time over his suspicions of Dexter. Deb moving in with him around the time Dexter started dating again. Proposing to her in his kitchen before she ran out on him and hid at Dexter's for a day, then dumped him.

"Do you see any pattern here?" asked Dr. Ross.

"That Dexter had way too much sway over her? I can see that, I'm not an idiot," said Joey.

Dr. Ross twirled a pencil between her fingers.

Afterwards Joey went home and lined up three shot glasses on the counter and filled them up with whiskey. He downed them one after the other, then capped the bottle and stowed it into a cupboard that still held a half-eaten box of Deb's favorite cereal in it. That was his limit ever since Deb had disappeared, confirming everything Joey had hoped against hope wasn't true. Three shots a day. Any more and he couldn't stop, any less and he couldn't keep going.

The Monday after Deb got caught, Joey made an exception and took his medicine in the morning. He did just fine until noon, just long enough to start deluding himself he could get through this shitshow without fucking up his life any worse.

At noon, he hid behind one of the big, fake-marble columns in front of the station with the cigarette packet that was lunch. He could hear someone on the other side, slurping and talking, and his cop's brain didn't even try to tune the guy out.

"I swear to God, Jerry, it's real. It was the motel manager, the sick fuck had cameras in all the rooms. Some bozo at the sheriff's office made a copy, tried to sell it online but nobody believed him so he just put it up for free. It's on every amateur porn site in fucking HD, man."

Joey's cigarette had burned down to the butt, neglected. He looked down in time to see the ash jerk free and settle into the shape of a question mark next to his shoe.

"It's quality shit too," the voice went on, higher now, more excited. "Morgan the sister is some nice looking piece of ass. I heard she spread it out, maybe I should have had a try at her before they went on the run. Too bad it's too late now. I heard she tried to play it like her brother raped her, like he kidnapped her and the kid, but there's no way that's flying now everyone can see her riding him into the mattress, moaning for it like a fucking wh-"

This would be something to liven up Joey's next visit to Dr. Ross, if there was one, Joey thought fifteen minutes later in the ambulance.

How was my week, Doc? Same old. I tried to knock out every tooth Steinbauer from Impound had in his grinning, smarmy mouth which would have definitely got me fired and most probably landed me in jail. Only I'm such a failure I slipped on the coffee he spilled lunging away from me, hit my empty fucking head on the column behind him and passed out. I came to while the EMTs were strapping me to a gurney in the middle of a crowd of people looking sorry for me, starting with Steinbauer who actually apologized to me, the fuck. I tried to sit up so I could strangle him and puked all over myself. How's that for grading?

He probably wasn't going to prison anyway, which was too bad because the way things were going he would have ended up being Dexter's cellmate.

He laughed, he fucking brayed like a donkey with his front smeared with vomit and the engagement ring he gave Deb in his wallet and the two EMTs looking unimpressed like this barely passed muster in the roller coaster of weird that was (their) life. After months of late night imaginary conversations with Deb, of spitting at her a million questions and trying to imagine any answers she could come up with that reconciled the her Joey had known with the unbelievable self that emerged piecemeal from evidence and conjecture, after all that finally there was nothing he wanted to ask her.

He'd finally got the joke. He had a feeling Deb hadn't.


End file.
